Stoakes’ Song of the Week
Well, it’s October and that means just one thing. It’s the month of Horror here at Stoakes Media, celebrating Halloween with some horror themed songs.
This is a tough list, there are so many to choose from, especially in rock and metal, in fact, lets face it – we do Halloween very well. So the hard thing is to consolidate this list into just four songs. One a week throughout the month. Even choosing which song to kick things off with was tricky…. But, I think I’ve cracked it. This is from the Prince of Darkness himself and his band of merry men, Black Sabbath!!
The title track of the bands self titled debut album, even those opening bells sound scary. Released on 13 February 1970 in the UK, the album reached number eight on the UK Albums Charts. Black Sabbath is widely considered the first heavy metal album and this song in particular is widely considered to be the first doom metal song.
According to the band, the song was inspired by an experience that Geezer Butler had. Butler, who was obsessed with the occult at the time, painted his apartment matte black, placed several inverted crucifixes, and put many pictures of Satan on the walls. Ozzy Osbourne handed Butler a black occult book, written in Latin and decorated with numerous pictures of Satan. Geezer read the book and then placed it on a shelf beside his bed before going to sleep. When he woke up, he claims he saw a large black figure standing at the end of his bed, staring at him. The figure vanished and Geezer ran to the shelf where he had placed the book earlier, but the book was gone. He later related this story to Ozzy, who then wrote the lyrics to the song based on the experience. The song starts with the lyrics:
What is this that stands before me?
Figure in black which points at me
Scary stuff! The song is one of the band’s most frequently performed tracks, being featured on every single tour of their career. The song and album for that matter has also featured on many of the top ten and top 100 lists, including being ranked as the 5th best metal album of all time, by Rolling Stone.
That being said, the album received generally negative reviews from contemporary critics. Rolling Stone‘s Lester Bangs described the band as, “just like Cream! But worse”, and he dismissed the album as “a shuck – despite the murky song titles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés”. Robert Christgau, writing for The Village Voice, panned the album as “bullshit necromancy.” He later described it as a reflection of “the worst of the counterculture,” including “drug-impaired reaction time” and “long solos.”
But alas, and I’ve said this before…. What do us music journalists know!! This song and the whole album have defined a genre. Without this song, we might not have what we now know as heavy metal. Imagine living in a world in which Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Metallica, Slipknot, Tool, Megadeth, Sabaton just didn’t exist… I could go on, the list is endless. We metal fans have a lot to thank Sabbath for!!
